I struggle for the best part of an evening trying to install ubuntu onto a usb stick. My first google searches results pointed towards usb-creator which from the outset looks good but continued to get various errors (Installation failed was the main annoying message).

Anyway, after googling various error messages I stumbled across this little beaut which saved the day, UNetbootin:

http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/

Why resizing a partition took 3 hours I’ll never know